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Marxist cultural analysis

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Not to be confused with Cultural Marxism conspiracy theory.

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Marxist cultural analysis is a form of cultural analysis and anti-capitalist cultural critique, which assumes the theory of cultural hegemony and from this specifically targets those aspects of culture that are profit driven and mass-produced under capitalism.[1][2][3][4]

The original theory behind this form of analysis is commonly associated with Georg Lukács, Antonio Gramsci, and the Frankfurt School, representing an important tendency within Western Marxism. Marxist cultural analysis has commonly considered the industrialization, mass-production, and mechanical reproduction of culture by the "culture industry" as having an overall negative effect on society, an effect which reifies the self-conception of the individual.[2][5]

The tradition of Marxist cultural analysis has also been referred to as "cultural Marxism", and "Marxist cultural theory", in reference to Marxist ideas about culture.[6][7][8][9][10][11] However, since the 1990s, the term "Cultural Marxism" has largely referred to the Cultural Marxism conspiracy theory, a conspiracy theory popular among the far right without any clear relationship to Marxist cultural analysis.[8]

Frankfurt School

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Main article: Frankfurt School

Critical theory, identified with the Institute for Social Research in interwar Germany and moving to the US after the rise of Hitler, applied Marxist as well as psychoanalytic concepts to the study of modern culture, in particular mass culture. The Frankfurt theorists, in particular Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, proposed that existing social theory was unable to explain the turbulent political factionalism and reactionary politics, such as Nazism, of 20th-century liberal capitalist societies. Also critical of Marxism–Leninism as a philosophically inflexible system of social organization, the School's critical-theory research sought alternative paths to social development.

What unites the disparate members of the School is a shared commitment to the project of human emancipation, theoretically pursued by an attempted synthesis of the Marxist tradition, psychoanalysis, and empirical sociological research.[12][13][14][15]

Critical theory analyzes the true significance of the ruling understandings (the dominant ideology) generated in bourgeois society in order to show that the dominant ideology misrepresents how human relations occur in the real world and how capitalism justifies and legitimates the domination of people. According to Frankfurt School, the dominant ideology is a ruling-class narrative that provides an explanatory justification of the current power-structure of society. Nonetheless, the story told through the ruling understandings conceals as much as it reveals about society. The task of the Frankfurt School was sociological analysis and interpretation of the areas of social-relation that Marx did not discuss in the 19th century – especially the base and superstructure aspects of a capitalist society.[16]

The essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction", by Adorno's close associate Walter Benjamin is a key text of cultural theory.[17] Benjamin is optimistic about the potential of commodified works of art to introduce radical political views to the proletariat.[18] In contrast, Adorno and Horkheimer saw the rise of the culture industry as promoting homogeneity of thought and entrenching existing authorities.[18] For instance, Adorno (a trained classical pianist) polemicized against popular music because it had become part of the culture industry of advanced capitalist society and the false consciousness that contributes to social domination. He argued that radical art and music may preserve the truth by capturing the reality of human suffering. Hence, "What radical music perceives is the untransfigured suffering of man.... The seismographic registration of traumatic shock becomes, at the same time, the technical structural law of music".[19]

This view of modern art as producing truth only through the negation of traditional aesthetic form and traditional norms of beauty because they have become ideological is characteristic of Adorno and of the Frankfurt School generally. In particular, Adorno criticized jazz and popular music, viewing them as part of the culture industry that contributes to the present sustainability of capitalism by rendering it "aesthetically pleasing" and "agreeable". Martin Jay has called the attack on jazz the least successful aspect of Adorno's work in America.[20]

Antonio Gramsci

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Antonio Gramsci was an Italian Marxist philosopher, primarily writing in the lead up to and after the First World War. He attempted to break from the economic determinism of classical Marxism thought and so is considered a neo-Marxist.[21]

Gramsci is best known for his theory of cultural hegemony, which describes how cultural institutions function to maintain the status of the ruling class. In Gramsci's view, hegemony is maintained by ideology; that is, without need for violence, economic force, or coercion. Hegemonic culture propagates its own values and norms so that they become the "common sense" values of all and maintain the status quo. Gramsci asserts that hegemonic power is used to maintain consent to the capitalist order rather than coercive power using force to maintain order and that this cultural hegemony is produced and reproduced by the dominant class through the institutions that form the superstructure.[22]

Birmingham School

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Main article: Cultural studies § British cultural studies

British Cultural Studies emerged in the 1960s and was housed at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies founded by Richard Hoggart (a non-Marxist socialist) in Birmingham and later directed by Stuart Hall (a Marxist). The Birmingham School developed later than the Frankfurt School and are seen as providing a parallel response.[4] Accordingly, British Cultural Studies focuses on later issues such as Americanization, censorship, globalization and multiculturalism. As well as Hoggart's The Uses of Literacy (1957), Raymond Williams' Culture and Society (1958) and Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class (1964) by the Marxist humanist historian E. P. Thompson form the foundational texts for the school, with Hall's encoding/decoding model of communication and his writings on multiculture and race arriving later but carrying equal gravitas.[23][24] Later key figures in the school included Paul Willis, Dick Hebdige, Angela McRobbie and Paul Gilroy.

The Birmingham School greatly valued and contributed to class consciousness within the structure of British society.[25] Whereas the Frankfurt School extolled the values of high culture, the Birmingham School celebrated ordinary culture.[2][26][27]

Marxism has been an important influence upon cultural studies. Those associated with CCCS initially engaged deeply with the structuralism of Louis Althusser, and later in the 1970s turned decisively toward Antonio Gramsci. To understand the changing political circumstances of class, politics, and culture in the United Kingdom, scholars at the Birmingham School made considerable use of Gramsci's concept of hegemony, which involves the formation of alliances between class factions, and struggles within the cultural realm of everyday common sense. Hegemony was always, for Gramsci, an interminable, unstable and contested process.[28] Scott Lash writes:

In the work of Hall, Hebdige and McRobbie, popular culture came to the fore... What Gramsci gave to this was the importance of consent and culture. If the fundamental Marxists saw the power in terms of class-versus-class, then Gramsci gave to us a question of class alliance. The rise of cultural studies itself was based on the decline of the prominence of fundamental class-versus-class politics.[29]

Another key concept developed by Hall and his colleagues, in their book, Policing the Crisis (1977), was Stanley Cohen's idea of moral panic, a way of exploring how the media of the dominant class creates folk devils in the popular imagination.

Cultural studies has also embraced the examination of race, gender, and other aspects of identity, as is illustrated, for example, by a number of key books published collectively under the name of CCCS in the late 1970s and early 1980s, including Women Take Issue: Aspects of Women's Subordination (1978), and The Empire Strikes Back: Race and Racism in 70s Britain (1982).

Critique of identity politics and postmodernism

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Contemporary Marxist philosophers have challenged postmodernism and identity politics, arguing that addressing material inequalities should remain at the center of left-wing political discourse.[30][31][32] Jürgen Habermas, an academic philosopher associated with the Frankfurt School, and a member of its second generation, is a critic of the theories of postmodernism, having presented cases against their style and structure in his work "The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity", in which he outlays the importance of communicative rationality and action.[33] He also makes the case that by being founded on and from within modernity, postmodernism has internal contradictions which make it unsustainable as an argument.[34]

Frankfurt School Associate, Nancy Fraser, has made critiques of modern identity politics and feminism in her New Left Review article "Rethinking Recognition",[32] as well as in her collection of essays "Fortunes of Feminism: From State-Managed Capitalism to Neoliberal Crisis" (1985–2010).[35]

"Cultural Marxism" conspiracy theory

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Main article: Cultural Marxism conspiracy theory

While the term "cultural Marxism" has been used in a general sense, to discuss the application of Marxist ideas in the cultural field,[11][36][37] the variant term "Cultural Marxism" generally refers to an antisemitic conspiracy theory.[38][39][40][41] Parts of the conspiracy theory make reference to actual thinkers and ideas selected from the Western Marxist tradition,[42][43][44] but they severely misrepresent the subject.[44][45] Conspiracy theorists exaggerate the actual influence of Marxist intellectuals,[46] for example, claiming that Marxist scholars aimed to infiltrate governments, perform mind-control over populations,[42][43][44][47] and destroy Western civilization.[38] Since there is no specific movement corresponding to the label, Joan Braune has argued it is not correct to use the term "Cultural Marxism" at all.[46]

See also

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References

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  1. ^ Kellner, Doug (10 November 2023). "Cultural Marxism, British cultural studies, and the reconstruction of education". Educational Philosophy and Theory. 55 (13): 1423–1435. doi:10.1080/00131857.2021.1926982. ISSN 0013-1857. S2CID 237716514.
  2. ^ a b c Barker, Chris; Jane, Emma (16 May 2016). Cultural Studies: Theory and Practice. SAGE. ISBN 9781473968349.
  3. ^ Habermas, Jürgen (1985). Theory of Communicative Action. Vol. 1. §IV. From Lukacs to Adorno: Beacon Press. ISBN 978-0807015070.
  4. ^ a b Kellner, Douglas. "Cultural Studies and Social Theory: A Critical Intervention" (PDF). UCLA. ucla.edu. Retrieved 31 August 2016.
  5. ^ Horkheimer, Max; W. Adorno, Theodor (2002). Dialectic of enlightenment philosophical fragments ([Nachdr.] ed.). Stanford, Calif.: Stanford Univ. Press. ISBN 978-0804736336.
  6. ^ Williams, Raymond (December 1973). "Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory". New Left Review (I/82): 3–16. Retrieved 17 February 2023.
  7. ^ Lye, Colleen; Nealon, Christopher (17 March 2022). After Marx: Literature, Theory, and Value in the Twenty-First Century. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-1-108-80839-2.
  8. ^ a b Braune, Joan (2019). "Who's Afraid of the Frankfurt School? 'Cultural Marxism' as an Antisemitic Conspiracy Theory" (PDF). Journal of Social Justice. 9. Retrieved 29 December 2021. The term does appear very occasionally in Marxist literature, but there is no pattern of using it to point specifically to the Frankfurt School
  9. ^ Kellner, Douglas. Cultural Marxism & Cultural Studies. Critical Quest, 2013, p.1, "Many 20th century Marxian theorists ranging from Georg Lukacs, Antonio Gramsci, Ernst Bloch, Walter Benjamin, and T.W. Adorno to Fredric Jameson and Terry Eagleton employed the Marxian theory to analyze cultural forms in relation to their production, their imbrications with society and history, and their impact and influences on audiences and social life. Traditions of cultural Marxism are thus important to the trajectory of cultural studies and to understanding its various types and forms in the present age."
  10. ^ Dworkin, Dennis L. Cultural Marxism in postwar Britain: History, the New Left, and the origins of cultural studies. Duke University Press, 1997, p.3, "British cultural Marxism grew out of an effort to create a socialist understanding of Britain which took into consideration postwar transformations that seemed to undermine traditional Marxist assumptions about the working class and that questioned the traditional Left's exclusive reliance on political and economic categories."
  11. ^ a b Jamin, Jérôme (6 February 2018). "Cultural Marxism: A survey". Religion Compass. 12 (1–2): e12258. doi:10.1111/REC3.12258. Cultural Marxism, and Critical Theory more generally with which it has a close signification, have both a direct link with the Frankfurt School and its Marxian theorists. Initially called the "Institute for Social Research" during the 1930s, and taking the label the "Frankfurt School" by the 1950s, the designation meant as much an academic environment as a geographical location. As Christian Bouchindhomme puts it in its entry devoted to "Critical Theory" in Raynaud and Rials' Dictionnaire de philosophie politique, the Frankfurt School has been more a label than a school, even if it referred to a real academic environment:
  12. ^ Celikates, Robin; Flynn, Jeffrey (2023). "Critical Theory (Frankfurt School)". The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University. Retrieved 18 February 2024.
  13. ^ Corradetti, Claudio. "The Frankfurt School and Critical Theory". Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
  14. ^ Held, David (1983). "Frankfurt School". In Bottomore, Tom (ed.). A Dictionary of Marxist Thought (2nd ed.). Blackwell. pp. 208–13.
  15. ^ Held, David (1980). Introduction to Critical Theory: Horkheimer to Habermas. University of California Press. p. 14.
  16. ^ Martin Jay. The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research 1923–1950. London: Heinemann, 1973, p. 21.
  17. ^ Kirsh, Adam (21 August 2006). "The Philosopher Stoned". The New Yorker.
  18. ^ a b Ross, Alex (15 September 2014). "The Naysayers". The New Yorker.
  19. ^ Adorno, Theodor W. (2003) The Philosophy of Modern Music. Translated into English by Anne G. Mitchell and Wesley V. Blomster. Continuum International Publishing Group, pp. 41–42.
  20. ^ Jay, Martin (1984). "Adorno In America". New German Critique. Winter 1984 (31). Duke University Press: 157–182. doi:10.2307/487894. JSTOR 487894.
  21. ^ Haralambos, Michael; Holborn, Martin (2013). Sociology Themes and Perspectives (8th ed.). New York City: HarperCollins. pp. 597–598. ISBN 978-0-00-749882-6.
  22. ^ "Hegemony in Gramsci – Postcolonial Studies". Retrieved 4 May 2021.
  23. ^ Cook, J., Daniel Thomas; Ryan, Michael (2015). The Wiley Blackwell encyclopedia of consumption and consumer studies ([Enhanced Credo] ed.). Chichester, West Sussex [England]. ISBN 9781786846129.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
  24. ^ Dudrah, Rajinder (July 2015). "Reading The Stuart Hall Project". Journal of British Cinema and Television. 12 (3): 383–401. doi:10.3366/jbctv.2015.0271.
  25. ^ Thompson, E. P. (1988). The making of the English working class (Reprinted. ed.). London [u.a.]: Penguin Books. ISBN 9780140210002.
  26. ^ Seiler, Robert M. "British Cultural Studies". people.ucalgary.ca. Retrieved 31 August 2016.
  27. ^ Hoggart, Richard (2009). The Uses of Literacy: aspects of working-class life (New ed.). London: Penguin. ISBN 978-0141191584.
  28. ^ Hall, Stuart (June 1986). "Gramsci's Relevance for the Study of Race and Ethnicity". Journal of Communication Inquiry. 10 (2): 5–27. doi:10.1177/019685998601000202. S2CID 53782.
  29. ^ Lash 2007, pp. 68–69
  30. ^ Aylesworth, Gary (2015). "Habermas's Critique". Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Retrieved 25 April 2017.
  31. ^ Habermas, Jürgen (1987). The philosophical discourse of modernity : twelve lectures (14. Nachdr. ed.). Cambridge: Polity in association with Basil Blackwell. ISBN 978-0262581028. Retrieved 25 April 2017.
  32. ^ a b Fraser, Nancy (May–June 2000). "Rethinking Recognition. New Left Review 3, May-June 2000". New Left Review. 3 (3): 107–120. Retrieved 25 April 2017.
  33. ^ Habermas, Jürgen (2018). The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity Twelve Lectures (1. Auflage ed.). New York. p. 210. ISBN 9780745692647.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
  34. ^ Aylesworth, Gary (2015). "Postmodernism". The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University. Retrieved 12 February 2021.
  35. ^ Fraser, Nancy (2020). Fortunes of feminism : from state-managed capitalism to neoliberal crisis. Brooklyn, NY. doi:10.1007/s10691-014-9258-0. ISBN 9781788738576. S2CID 142770749. Retrieved 12 February 2021.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
  36. ^ Markwick, Roger (2010). "Gurevich's Contribution to Soviet and Russian Historiography: From Social-psychology to Historical Anthropology". In Mazour-Matusevič, Yelena; Korros, Alexandra (eds.). Saluting Aron Gurevich: Essays in History, Literature and Other Related Subjects. Brill. p. 42. ISBN 978-90-04-18650-7. Marxist cultural analysis, as it emerged in post-war Western and Eastern Europe, was a reaction to the tendency within Soviet-style Marxism to treat culture as a mere secondary epiphenomenon of economic relations, of classes and modes of production. Western European Marxists led the way. The humanist Marxism of the New Left, which first emerged in the late 1950s, increasingly engaged with anthropological conceptions of culture that emphasized human agency: language, communication, experience, and consciousness. By the 1960s and 1970s Western cultural Marxism was engaged in a dialogue with structuralism, post-structuralism and semiotics.
  37. ^ Arce, José Manuel Valenzuela. "Cultural diversity, social exclusion and youth in Latin America" (PDF). Euroamericano. Some of the most suggestive criticisms of the path taken by many followers of the Birmingham School (not of its founders) emphasize that they have let themselves be caught out by a certain textual condition, where the text seems to acquire a self-contained condition, overlooking the connection with social contexts. Therefore, Fredric Jameson emphasizes the need to recover the critical theory of culture that comes from Marx, Freud, the School of Frankfurt, Luckács, Sartre and complex Marxism, and suggests redefining cultural studies as cultural Marxism and as a critique of capitalism. For this, the economic, political and social formations should be considered and the importance of social classes highlighted (Jameson, 1998).
  38. ^ a b Busbridge, Rachel; Moffitt, Benjamin; Thorburn, Joshua (June 2020). "Cultural Marxism: Far-Right Conspiracy Theory in Australia's Culture Wars". Social Identities. 26 (6). London, England: Taylor & Francis: 722–738. doi:10.1080/13504630.2020.1787822. S2CID 225713131. One of the issues associated with the Cultural Marxist conspiracy is that Cultural Marxism is a distinct philosophical approach associated with some strands of the Frankfurt School, as well as ideas and influences emanating from the British New Left. However, proponents of the conspiracy do not regard Cultural Marxism as a form of left-wing cultural criticism, but instead as a calculated plan orchestrated by leftist intellectuals to destroy Western values, traditions and civilisation, carried out since at least the 1930s (Berkowitz, 2003; Breitbart, 2011, pp. 105–135).
  39. ^ Brenkman, John (1983). "Theses on Cultural Marxism". Social Text (7). Duke University Press: 19–33. doi:10.2307/466452. JSTOR 466452.
  40. ^ Jamin, Jérôme (6 February 2018). "Cultural Marxism: A survey". Religion Compass. 12 (1–2): e12258. doi:10.1111/REC3.12258.
  41. ^ Braune, Joan (2019). "Who's Afraid of the Frankfurt School? 'Cultural Marxism' as an Antisemitic Conspiracy Theory" (PDF). Journal of Social Justice. 9. Archived (PDF) from the original on 16 July 2020. Retrieved 11 September 2020.
  42. ^ a b Jamin, Jérôme (6 February 2018). "Cultural Marxism: A survey". Religion Compass. 12 (1–2): e12258. doi:10.1111/REC3.12258. When looking at the literature on Cultural Marxism as a piece of cultural studies, as a conspiracy described by Lind and its followers, and as arguments used by Buchanan, Breivik, and other actors within their own agendas, we see a common ground made of unquestionable facts in terms of who did what and where, and for how long at the Frankfurt School. Nowhere do we see divergence of opinion about who Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, and Herbert Marcuse really were, when they have met and in which universities. But this changes if we look at descriptions of what they wanted to do: conducting research or changing deeply the culture of the West? Were they working for political science or were they engaging with a hidden political agenda? Were they working for the academic community or obeying foreign secret services?
  43. ^ a b Tuters, M. (2018). "Cultural Marxism". Krisis: Journal for Contemporary Philosophy. 2018 (2): 32–34. hdl:11245.1/7b72bcec-9ad2-4dc4-8395-35b4eeae0e9e. The concept of Cultural Marxism seeks to introduce readers unfamiliar with – and presumably completely uninterested in – Western Marxist thought to its key thinkers, as well as some of their ideas, as part of an insidious story of secret operations of mind-control[...]
  44. ^ a b c Tuters, M. (2018). "Cultural Marxism". Krisis: Journal for Contemporary Philosophy. 2018 (2): 32–34. hdl:11245.1/7b72bcec-9ad2-4dc4-8395-35b4eeae0e9e. The Cultural Marxist narrative attributes incredible influence to the power of the ideas of the Frankfurt School to the extent that it may even be read as a kind of "perverse tribute" to the latter (Jay 2011). In one account, for example (Estulin 2005), Theodor Adorno is thought to have helped pioneer new and insidious techniques for mind control that are now used by the "mainstream media" to promote its "liberal agenda" – this as part of Adorno's work, upon first emigrating to the United States, with Paul Lazarsfeld on the famous Princeton Radio Research Project, which helped popularize the contagion theory of media effects with its study of Orson Welles' 1938 broadcast of The War of the Worlds. In an ironical sense this literature can perhaps be understood as popularizing simplified or otherwise distorted versions of certain concepts initially developed by the Frankfurt School, as well as those of Western Marxism more generally.
  45. ^ Woods, Andrew (2019). "Cultural Marxism and the Cathedral: Two Alt-Right Perspectives on Critical Theory". Critical Theory and the Humanities in the Age of the Alt-Right. Springer International Publishing. pp. 39–59. doi:10.1007/978-3-030-18753-8_3. ISBN 978-3-030-18753-8.
  46. ^ a b Braune, Joan (2019). "Who's Afraid of the Frankfurt School? 'Cultural Marxism' as an Antisemitic Conspiracy Theory" (PDF). Journal of Social Justice. 9. Retrieved 11 September 2020. Although some members of the Frankfurt School had cultural influence—in particular, some books by Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse were influential on some activists on the New Left in the 1960s—"Cultural Marxism" conspiracy theories greatly exaggerate the Frankfurt School's influence and power. Furthermore, there is no academic field known as "Cultural Marxism." Scholars of the Frankfurt School are called Critical Theorists, not Cultural Marxists. Scholars in various other fields that often get lumped into the "Cultural Marxist" category, such as postmodernists and feminist scholars, also do not generally call their fields of study Cultural Marxism, nor do they share perfect ideological symmetry with Critical Theory. The term does appear very occasionally in Marxist literature, but there is no pattern of using it to point specifically to the Frankfurt School--Marxist philosopher of aesthetics Frederic Jameson, for example, uses the term, but his use of the term "cultural" refers to his aesthetics, not to a specific commitment to the Frankfurt School. In short, Cultural Marxism does not exist—not only is the conspiracy theory version false, but there is no intellectual movement by that name.3
  47. ^ Braune, Joan (2019). "Who's Afraid of the Frankfurt School? 'Cultural Marxism' as an Antisemitic Conspiracy Theory" (PDF). Journal of Social Justice. 9. Retrieved 11 September 2020. Cultural Marxists, the conspiracy theorists believe, now control all areas of public life, including the media, schools, entertainment, the economy, and national and global systems of governance. Not only does this theory vastly overestimate the influence of a small group of intellectuals, the conspiracy theory trades on the Frankfurt School's perceived Jewishness and amplifies antisemitic tropes.
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